Nehru Vs Patel: An Open Debatehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/25984/feed
enNehru vs Patel: The Towering Twohttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/nehru-vs-patel-the-towering-two
<p>THE MOST INTRACTABLE problem with the latest controversy over the relative virtues and shortcomings of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is that it centres on counter-factual history. What- if is a wonderful parlour game and even has a place in politics, especially when invoking nostalgia or lament.</p>
<p>I grew up in a Bengali society that was dominated by a collective despair over the brave Netaji who didn’t return home after 1945. There was always a flickering hope that he was still around, somewhere, and that one day, when the nation needed him the most, he would return, re-enter public life and lead India towards achieving its national destiny. That hope was never realised and, consequently, to this day, there is unending debate over what would have happened had Subhas Chandra Bose returned to India after the conclusion of World War II.</p>
<p>Those familiar with the history of the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland in the early 19th century may see parallels between the Bose legend and those surrounding Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart claimant who missed reclaiming his lost inheritance by a whisker but whose feats were the stuff of inspirational poetry and songs.</p>
<p>India is not the only country where what-if history persists. It is now recognised that the appointment of Winston Churchill as prime minister in May 1940, Britain’s ‘darkest hour’—now celebrated as an inspirational film—was the consequence of a happy set of coincidences. The eminently readable <em>Six Minutes in May</em> by Nicholas Shakespeare, published last year, has a vivid account of how it was Churchill’s blunders in Norway that made the position of Neville Chamberlain untenable. Ideally, the prime ministership should have passed on to Lord Halifax, the man India is more familiar as Viceroy Lord Irwin, who had wide support in the Conservative Party, whereas Churchill was felt to be reckless and untrustworthy. Alas, Halifax lacked ambition. He was content spending his time between his ministerial responsibilities and his very sweet companionship with ‘Baba’ Metcalfe, a daughter of another Indian Viceroy, Lord Curzon, at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. Had Halifax become prime minister in May 1940, it is entirely conceivable— but hardly certain—that Britain may have negotiated a truce of sorts with Nazi Germany. That may have been terrible for civilisation but it would certainly have kept alive the British Empire for a few more decades.</p>
<p>The problem with counter-factual history is that it is based entirely on conjecture. What-if history is like a plasticine ball: it can be moulded in any way to suit preferences or even a pre-determined conclusion. This is not to disagree with the political thrust of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion in his Lok Sabha speech on the President’s address that, “Had Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel been India’s first Prime Minister, a part of my Kashmir would not have been with Pakistan today.” The incontrovertible truth is that it is impossible to say.</p>
<p>The indications are contradictory. There is evidence that Patel, at one time, wanted to use India’s claim on Jammu & Kashmir as a bargaining counter to Pakistan’s claim on Hyderabad. At the same time, India’s first Home Minister was opposed to referring the dispute to the United Nations, as Nehru did, quite unilaterally. Similarly, once the war with the Pakistan-backed militia began after the Accession of 1948, Patel was quite clear that India would have to safeguard its sovereign territory by every means at its disposal. Patel supported the Cabinet decision to give Jammu & Kashmir ‘Special Status’ under Article 370 of the Constitution, but in all likelihood he would have insisted that the term ‘temporary’ for the provision be adhered to. After all, he seems to have been in favour of resettling some of the Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Pakistan in Jammu & Kashmir.</p>
<p>It is impossible to be certain how Patel would have responded to the Kashmir situation had he, and not Nehru, been at the helm of affairs. Sheikh Abdullah, for example, had a special relationship with Nehru that extended beyond his relationship with Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress. Would he have responded in the same way to Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s overtures to him to stake his future in Pakistan had Patel been the Prime Minister of India? Would he have contested the Maharaja’s accession to India? These are issues that have no easy answers.</p>
<p>What can be said with a measure of certainty is that there was a fundamental difference in the political approach of Nehru and Patel. Nehru, having spent an inordinate amount of time in Europe, and sensitive to how non-Indians—both political and intellectual stalwarts—felt, always had one eye on world reaction. He was concerned about being seen to be doing the right thing and not offending the ‘progressive’ fraternity globally. His anguish over Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India Movement stemmed almost entirely from his concern over any weakening of the ongoing war against fascism. Nehru had a convivial relationship with the Labour government that was in power until 1951. Nehru was not pro-Pakistan, as some mistakenly believe. However, he felt that after its formation, Pakistan had allied with reactionary forces in Britain and elsewhere and thus had to be contained and persuaded to acknowledge the error of its ways.</p>
<p>BY CONTRAST, PATEL didn’t carry any ideological baggage. He was often dismissive of Nehru’s abiding interest in the larger anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. His sphere of interest was India and he had a single-minded interest in the attainment of Indian independence which he believed was only possible under the leadership, particularly the moral guidance, of the Mahatma. At the same time, unlike Nehru who had a loose intellectual commitment to socialism, Patel was a firm believer in a strong Indian state. Nehru, for example, may have been culturally at ease with Anglophile Indians in the Indian Civil Service. Patel, however, viewed the ICS functionally. India, he realised, needed a robust administration and competent individuals able to translate political intent into reality. Since the ICS already existed, he felt there was no need to reinvent the wheel. In his view, those who had served the British diligently could now serve their new Congress masters.</p>
<p>The Sardar believed there was no place for sentimentalism in governance. He was both ruthless and a bit of a bully in the way he persuaded and threatened the many Princely states into acceding to the Indian Union. Nehru had a distaste for the Maharajas because they represented an archaic feudal order. Patel wasn’t least bothered about the personal angularities of the Maharajas. His priority was to secure the integration of the Princely states and he pursued that objective with managerial proficiency.</p>
<p>When it came to the problematic ‘Muslim’ question, Patel was very different from both Nehru and the Mahatma. Nehru firmly believed that Hindus and Muslims were fighting a common battle for self-government and economic empowerment. In his view, they were tied by common interests. He tried to make Muslims aware of this through the Muslim mass contact programme that followed the Congress’ disastrous showing in Muslim constituencies in the provincial elections of 1937. He even shunned the Muslim League’s appeal to the Congress to be permitted to join provincial ministries, prompting Jinnah to harden his separatism and eventually demand Pakistan.</p>
<p>Patel wasn’t anti-Muslim, but like most Congress leaders he didn’t believe that the party should consciously shed its Hindu imagery to reach out to Muslims. For Patel, as with Rajendra Prasad and most of the Congress’ provincial stalwarts, Vande Mataram and opposition to cow slaughter weren’t negotiable. As S Gopal, Nehru’s biographer, correctly noted: ‘The old stalwarts of the Congress …such as Patel, Rajendra Prasad, with the backing of the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, believed not so much in a theocratic state as in a state which symbolised the interests of the Hindu majority.’</p>
<p>Patel didn’t believe that Muslims needed any special accommodation in independent India. He believed the community should join the mainstream as equal citizens. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly on a motion pressing for the continuation of separate electorates, he said with characteristic forthrightness: “I once more appeal to you to forget the past… You have got what you wanted. You have got a separate state and remember, you are the people who were responsible for it, and not those who remain in Pakistan. You led the agitation… What is it that you want now? I don’t understand. In the majority Hindu provinces you, the minorities, you led the agitation. You got the Partition and now again you tell me and ask me to say for the purpose of securing the affection of the younger brother that I must agree to the same thing again, to divide the country again in the divided part. For God’s sake, understand that we have also got some sense… There will be generosity towards you, but there must be reciprocity. If it is absent then you can take it from me that no soft words can conceal what is beyond your words. Therefore, I plainly once more appeal to you strongly that let us forget and let us be one nation.”</p>
<p>Nehru and Patel didn’t fight. They worked as a team from Independence to Patel’s death in 1950, with Nehru as the leader. However, these two towering personalities were never similar. Their approaches were divergent. In time, they would probably have parted ways. That parting didn’t happen in real life. It has taken place in the battle for their legacy.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/NehruPatel.jpg?itok=_P19o9ys" /><div>BY: Swapan Dasgupta</div><div>Node Id: 23975</div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:20:12 +0000vijayopen23975 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Uses and Abuses of What-if Historyhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/the-uses-and-abuses-of-what-if-history
<p>THERE IS THIS scene in <em>Darkest Hour</em> when a prosthetically enlarged Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill takes a ride on the London Underground to make up his mind on Hitler. The Führer has reached Poland, and entire Europe is in panic in the face of the advancing Nazi force. Within Britain’s ruling Conservative party, grandees are pressing the prime minister to negotiate peace with Hitler, and a plan for a coup in Westminster is afoot. The “delusional alcoholic” at the helm is in two minds. That’s when the screenwriter and the director, defying history, send the cigar-chomping old man for a ride on the tube so that he can gauge the public mood. And it’s this short trip to Westminster that engenders the stirring lines of Churchill in the House of Commons: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”</p>
<p>Churchill never took the tube. And most Churchill scholars argue that the man’s mind was not divided on Hitler. He was not Hamlet, vexing over the destiny of the Western hemisphere from his bathtub. The tube scene is the one that makes the movie: it humanises Churchill, provides emotional ballast to an epochal decision in history. But it is not history. It is poetic licence. While it has turned a Conservative columnist like Charles Moore away from the movie, it’s another what-if moment in storytelling that dramatises the past and divides the present. Thriller writers have made a fortune out of it, and my favourite remains Robert Harris’ <em>Fatherland</em>—what if the Nazis had won World War II? ‘What-if’ replaces rigidities of the factual with the elasticity of the fictional. It is a kind of creative manipulation that can make history a cautionary tale, a moral puzzle, or a war of unsavoury minds, depending on the ingenuity of your imagination.</p>
<p>In politics at its basest, it’s the sloganeer’s ally. It allows the politician to reduce history to an easily comprehensible—and saleable—combat of moral stereotypes. It equips the patriot to choose his heroes and banish his tormentors. It casts a shadow of historical grievances over battlegrounds of the day. It makes the payback moment a thriller. The historicity of what Prime Minister Modi has said about Sardar Patel and Kashmir has suddenly made politics a story of injustice in retrospect. <em>Kashmir would not have been divided had Patel been the Prime Minister. But Patel was beaten by Nehru</em>…</p>
<p>It has the making of an unwritten historical mystery.</p>
<p>Nehru and Patel. It was a partnership built on intellectual antagonism, and when you look back from the vantage point of 2018, you realise that its narrative complexity carries within itself enough subplots to suit present political needs. Modi is an admirer of the original strongman of India, the other great Gujarati wronged by history—and the Family. Patel as an underdog in a historical saga—a lone voice of nationalist honour pitted against the Establishment—is an image that Modi loves to identify with, emotionally as well as politically. And he’s within his rights to do so. It’s Patel’s differences with Nehru, rather than the inevitable reconciliation in the end, that make the two men worthy of a dispute even seven decades after independence. It’s a tribute to the power of argument in politics.</p>
<p>Every idol in history is prone to climatic damage. Nehru was protected from questions for a long time in India by those who claimed a copyright over his intellectual tradition, which can be summed up as internationalist poetics that borrowed heavily from the prevailing utopias. He was the official nation builder, and for the world, Third Worldism’s brainiest poet. Today, if the idea of Modi has taken root in an India shaped by the Nehruvian ideal of secularism, it only shows the viability of a new argument on the nation—and its possibilities.</p>
<p>The new argument is not necessarily a repudiation of Nehru. His irrelevance is a premature celebration. It’s not that his India has run its course and the old ghosts of nationalism are marching out of the trapdoors. It’s that India as a nation has acquired the confidence to face up to the past and reread its provenance. In this rereading, Patel adds an aura of dissent to our story of fractured freedom. Politics is meaningful, and worth its slogans, when revered holograms are rejected and icons are cracked. History is static—and question-proof—only in places where democracy is a pretence. A past powered by the Dissenting Strongman and the Dreamy Intellectual enriches the legacy of freedom—and the political content of the present.</p>
<p>Some provocations, like the one triggered by the Prime Minister’s brief trip to history, let democracy argue with the past. We are better off that way.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Introduction.jpg?itok=u0JD_e38" /><div>BY: S Prasannarajan</div><div>Node Id: 23974</div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:05:38 +0000vijayopen23974 at http://www.openthemagazine.comNehru Vs Patel: Dissimilar Disciples, Common Causehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/nehru-vs-patel-dissimilar-disciples-common-cause
<p>THE PATEL VERSUS Nehru debate is as old as Free India’s history. Or perhaps older. Therefore, it is only natural that every time someone wants to spite the main opposition Congress—an emaciated party which, for all practical reasons, is remote-controlled by the Nehru dynasty—the ‘if Patel were Prime Minister’ argument gets lapped up for political posturing more than anything else. What gets buried in this melee is the tragedy that the RSS-BJP doesn’t have an icon other than Nehru’s own comrade-in-arms—his deputy in the Union Cabinet, a true-blood Congressman, a leader and unifier who had publicly aired his sharp disapproval of the RSS’s ways—to invoke in order to trash the legacy of the first Prime Minister of India.</p>
<p>Far more than irony, the fight to appropriate Patel’s legacy puts the spotlight on the Right’s search for someone who could give it a piece of history that has evaded it. Nehru and Patel were rivals and they almost came to a public spat on one occasion, but many letters exchanged between the two prove that far from being locked in a mutual battle of self-interest, both these great men acted as a check on each other. Besides, despite points of friction, at the end of the day, Patel did accept Nehru as his leader.</p>
<p>They differed vastly in their views, but then the Congress of the time was an umbrella organisation that sheltered a constellation of views and counter-views, though there were aberrations. While Jawaharlal Nehru wanted the first Indian Governor General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari as President of India, Patel threw his weight behind a person more inclined to his views, Rajendra Prasad, who cleverly stated that he would withdraw from the race if both Nehru and Patel concurred over the question. That never happened, and Prasad became the country’s first president. It is not that Rajagopalachari could be bracketed as a Nehru loyalist; rather, he was one whom Mahatma Gandhi had often looked up to as an alternative to Nehru himself. Rajaji and Nehru weren’t on the same page on myriad issues, as a realignment of forces would confirm later.</p>
<p>The deep differences between Patel and Nehru were also palpable when Patel backed Purushottam Das Tandon as Congress president even as Nehru pitched Acharya Kripalani, never a good friend of the Prime Minister, to take on Tandon. But Tandon won. When Patel was alive, Nehru clearly adopted a give-and-take approach and played his cards cleverly—as did Patel. It is another story that Nehru ensured that Tandon, often portrayed as a Muslim- baiter, exited nine months after Patel’s death. Tandon resigned on September 10th, 1951, at an emergency high-level meeting of the Congress, which elected Nehru as the next president. The resolution was tabled in the meeting by Nehru man Govind Ballabh Pant.</p>
<p>Despite their ideological sparring, viewing the Patel-Nehru relationship in black-and-white terms could be a grave error for anyone in an influential position; for, that could help generate one falsehood after another in place of historical facts. Theirs was a complex relation, and both belonged to a generation whose values are incapable of being judged by contemporary political yardsticks and without a proper sense of history. Of course, as <em>Open</em> columnist Shashi Tharoor and several historians have pointed out earlier in their books, Nehru and Patel came to a major confrontation only over the issue of East Pakistan. There again, when Nehru challenged Patel to a public debate, the latter, despite his formidable strength in the Congress party, chose to give up and endorse Nehru’s views, a confirmation that their ties cannot be properly understood without factoring in their ideas on propriety and safeguarding of political interests. Strange their friendship may have been, but it endured turbulent times both before and after freedom.</p>
<p>Speculative assertions and hypothetical questions like ‘What if Sardar Patel had lived beyond December 1950?’ or ‘What if Nehru had died before Patel?’ don’t mean much if the intention is to fathom the depth of friendship or intensity of differences between the two. True, as Marxist scholar Perry Anderson has argued in his <em>The Indian Ideology</em>, Nehru, son of a wealthy man, had a sense of entitlement very early on and knew very well that he was promoting his daughter to the higher echelons of the Congress. Nehru wasn’t a darling of Indian communists either, especially after the dismissal of EMS Namboodiripad’s government in Kerala in 1959 over frivolous contentions, a decision that if he were alive, would surely secure full marks from Patel. In fact, their differences were far more nuanced to be left to mere politicians to gauge. They had, as new documents reveal, no differences over the use of force in many parts of the country to bring such territory under the Indian Union. The Hyderabad ‘police action’ of September 1948, codenamed Operation Polo, is a case in point. Recent outbursts over Kashmir also bring out the irrationality of casual assessments made about their differences, notwithstanding the personal attributes of these two individuals: one was a hedonist and the other a tireless worker.</p>
<p>More than anything, letters between Patel and Nehru point to mutual respect and the liberty to hit out at each other loudly or agree wholeheartedly. A celebration of that democratic spirit at the country’s topmost levels during its most trying times, those fledgling years of independence, speaks of functionality rather than lack of it. Without their debates, the overall discourse would have been poorer.</p>
<p>The following is an excerpt from a letter Patel wrote to Gandhi about Nehru on January 13th, 1948, after having clearly pronounced their differences:</p>
<p>‘The burden of work has become so heavy that I feel crushed under it. I now see that it would do no good to the country or to myself to carry on like this any more. It might do harm.</p>
<p>Jawahar is even more burdened than I. His heart is heavy with grief. Maybe I have deteriorated with age and am no more any good as a comrade to stand by him, and lighten his burden... and you have to again and again take up cudgels on my behalf. This is also intolerable to me.</p>
<p>In the circumstances, it will perhaps be good for me and for the country if you now let me go. I cannot do otherwise than I am doing....’</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Letters between Patel and Nehru point to mutual respect and the liberty to hit out at each other loudly or agree wholeheartedly</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nehru’s reply to Patel (to the letter to Gandhi which was copied to him as well) was delayed by the assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse.</p>
<p>Nehru replied finally to Patel on February 3rd, 1948:</p>
<p>‘...Now, with Bapu’s death, everything is changed and we have to face a different and more difficult world. The old controversies have ceased to have much significance and it seems to me that the urgent need of the hour is for all of us to function as closely and cooperatively as possible. Indeed, there is no other way.</p>
<p>I have been greatly distressed by the persistence of whispers and rumours about you and me, magnifying out of all proportion any difference we may have. This has spread to foreign ambassadors and foreign correspondents; mischief-makers take advantage of this and add to it. Even the Services are affected and this is bad. We must put an end to this mischief.</p>
<p>It is over a quarter of a century since we have been closely associated with one another and we have faced many storms and perils together. I can say with full honesty that during this period my affection and regard for you have grown, and I do not think anything can happen to lessen this. Even our differences have brought out the far greater points of agreement between us and the respect we bear to each other. We have even agreed to differ and yet carry on together.</p>
<p>I had hoped to have a long chat with you, but we are so terribly pressed for time that we can hardly see each other in private for long... such talks are necessary from time to time. But meanwhile, I do not want to wait for this talk and hence this letter, which carries with it my affection and friendship for you.’</p>
<p>As soon as he received the letter, Patel wrote back to Nehru, on February 5th, 1948:</p>
<p>‘I am deeply touched, indeed overwhelmed, by the affection and warmth of you letter of 3 February. I fully and heartily reciprocate the sentiment you have so feelingly expressed.</p>
<p>We have both been life-long comrades in a common cause. The paramount interests of our country and our mutual love and regard, transcending such differences of outlook and temperament as existed, have held us together. Both of us have stuck passionately to our respective points of view or methods of work; still we have always sustained a unity of heart which has stood many a stress and strain and which has enabled us to function jointly both in the Congress and in the government.</p>
<p>... I agree with you that we must find more time for mutual consultations so that we can keep each other informed of, and in touch with, what is happening and we can thus resolve any points of difference that might arise.</p>
<p>We should also find an early opportunity to have a long talk and clear our mind of any doubts and difficulties that may be there. Continued harping on our differences in public or private is bad for us, bad for the Services and bad for the country. The sooner we set this at rest once for all and clear the murky atmosphere the better.’</p>
<p>Among the letters they would exchange over the next many months, at a time when Patel had already had a heart attack and then cancer in the stomach, both communicated on issues of differences, spelling out each of them clearly and opening their hearts out to protest and at times rail against each other (of course, in their own temperate ways). Their letters touched upon the military option in East Pakistan, quibbles over who did what in the bureaucracy and the need to keep the Cabinet in the loop on crucial decisions, among other issues. The letters offer an insight into the forthrightness of our topmost leaders of the Independence generation. In the case of Nehru and Patel, their combination seems to have ushered in—for at least several decades—political ethics that upheld democratic values as well as the consolidation of India’s newly won freedom.</p>
<p>After Patel’s death aged 76, Nehru displayed extreme shrewdness and dexterity in reining in his rivals within the Congress and the Cabinet; yet he remained a democrat in the sense of not letting the country slip into a dictatorial mode. For him, the persona of being a true democrat in the global scheme of things was paramount and his ambition to be recognised as a global statesman was evident. He also contributed immensely to the building of institutions in the country and their effective running. Would Patel have succeeded in containing socialism in India is another ‘what if’ that can be raised. While it is difficult to offer an answer, Nehru, with his quasi-socialist policies and progressive sounding speeches, was able to resist a movement that would have otherwise shaped up into a national phenomenon. Surely, the religion- obsessed political legacy of Gandhi also contributed greatly to the weakening of socialist movements in the country.</p>
<p>Patel was a pragmatist, a doer, and he certainly deserves credit for warning Nehru, a dreamer and a romantic who made several big mistakes to go with his stellar contributions to parliamentary democracy in the early years of our fragile freedom, about the intentions of the Chinese. Distraught about India’s naive policy towards China, a country that had historically been a hard nut to crack for multiple colonial empires, Patel wrote a letter to Nehru a month before his death in November, 1950. Nothing could be more prophetic.</p>
<p>‘... I am, however, giving below some of the problems which, in my opinion, require early solution and around which we have to build our administrative or military policies and measures to implement them.</p>
<p>a) A military and intelligence appreciation of the Chinese threat to India both on the frontier and to internal security.</p>
<p>b) An examination of military position and such redisposition of our forces as might be necessary, particularly with the idea of guarding important routes or areas which are likely to be the subject of dispute.</p>
<p>c) An appraisement of the strength of our forces and, if necessary, reconsideration of our retrenchment plans for the Army in the light of the new threat.</p>
<p>d) A long-term consideration of our defence needs. My own feeling is that, unless we assure our supplies of arms, ammunition and armour, we would be making our defence perpetually weak and we would not be able to stand up to the double threat of difficulties both from the west and north-west and north and north-east.</p>
<p>e) The question of China’s entry into the UN. In view of the rebuff that China has given us and the method it has followed in dealing with Tibet, I am doubtful whether we can advocate its claim any longer. There would probably be a threat in the UN virtually to outlaw China, in view of its active participation in the Korean War. We must determine our attitude on this question also.’</p>
<p>If—and that is a big if—Patel had been alive to complement Nehru in his foreign-policy ventures in the decade ahead, especially when Chinese intransigence and the Indian position became too wide for comfort, perhaps things would have been different. But then again, perhaps not.</p>
<p>Most importantly, any disregard of facts needs to be called out. Instead of highlighting the Nehru-Patel differences, the current crop of politicians cutting across party lines could learn a lesson or two on how to disagree with respect and put the country’s interests before their own.</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/the-uses-and-abuses-of-what-if-history" target="_blank">The Uses and Abuses of What-if History</a><br /><a href="http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/nehru-vs-patel-the-towering-two" target="_blank">Nehru vs Patel: The Towering Two</a><br /><a href="http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/nehru-vs-patel-unity-in-diversity" target="_blank">Nehru vs Patel: Unity in Diversity</a><br /><a href="http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/vallabhbhai-patel-iron-in-the-soul" target="_blank">Vallabhbhai Patel: Iron in the Soul</a></p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Commoncause1.jpg?itok=FGY5-DYL" /><div>BY: Ullekh NP</div><div>Node Id: 23961</div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 08:15:07 +0000vijayopen23961 at http://www.openthemagazine.comVallabhbhai Patel: Iron in the Soulhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nehru-vs-patel-an-open-debate/vallabhbhai-patel-iron-in-the-soul
<p>In SEPTEMBER 1949, Vallabhbhai Patel faced what was probably the last big challenge to unifying India. Just two years after signing an Act of Accession, the king of Manipur began displaying unease at the possibility of fuller integration with India. His dream of independence gathered steam when a new Dewan, or chief minister, was appointed. The first noise of the ‘Indian danger’ came from the newly elected state Assembly, which was packed with legislators of the Praja Shanti, the ‘king’s party’. Sri Prakasa, the Governor of Assam who doubled as the pointman for the state, was a man with a strong reservoir of resolve. But in dealing with King Bodhchandra Singh, he displayed the grace for which Congressmen of that age were well known. Suddenly, he seemed to be at a loss in dealing with the obdurate king. In September, he travelled to Bombay to meet the ailing Patel. The latter had just one question: was there no brigadier in Shillong? In exactly a month, the ruler had signed his kingdom over. Just over a year later, Patel died.</p>
<p>At that point in Independent India’s history, actions such as that orchestrated by Patel in Manipur went under the rubric of nation building. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had one to his sole credit as well: the liberation of Goa in 1961. It is unlikely that such achievements will secure the approval of Indian intellectuals today, let alone be celebrated. If anything, they would attract sustained opprobrium, as revealed by the case of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), in which Nehru and Patel played an equal role. But there’s a difference: while Nehru’s legacy is defended with gusto, Patel has been portrayed with equal vigour as a villain.</p>
<p>Something similar happened on February 7th. In his reply to a motion of thanks to the President’s address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha that, “Had Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel been the first Prime Minister, a part of Kashmir would not have been under the control of Pakistan.” In the days since that statement, a volley of protests, contestations about his record on Kashmir, and the <em>de rigueur</em> denunciation of Patel has followed.</p>
<p>Take the case of Kashmir. Some observers claim that had Patel’s schemes been allowed, not just a part of Kashmir but the entire state would have been lost to Pakistan. Much of this interpretation rests on reading letters and other records of that time. A case in point is the Indian offer of November 1st, 1947, to Pakistan. Lord Mountbatten was Governor General of India at the time, and, more importantly, also chairman of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DCC), the forerunner of the present-day Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). It was a strange arrangement: Mountbatten was not an Indian citizen and was yet in charge of the top defence decision- making body of that time. He was in that position on the agreement of the Union Cabinet, which included both Nehru and Patel.</p>
<p>The offer that Mountbatten made in Lahore to Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was ‘drafted out in the aeroplane’ and was ‘a formula which I had not yet shown to my Government but to which I thought they might agree’, in his words. Under this formula, the Governor General proposed a plebiscite in Kashmir. Jinnah first said a plebiscite was redundant and that states should go according to their majority population. His idea was simple: give Kashmir to Pakistan and take Junagadh—then under dispute—for India. When Mountbatten insisted on a plebiscite to ascertain the wishes of the people of the two states, Jinnah refused that on the ground that ‘he could not accept a formula if it was so drafted as to include Hyderabad…’</p>
<p>That was the end of any peaceful resolution of these disputes. In the end, India got Hyderabad, Junagadh and a large part of Kashmir. There is no evidence that Mountbatten’s ‘aeroplane drafted formula’ was rejected by either Nehru or Patel. And yet, Patel is blamed for trying to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan for ‘communal reasons’—that is, the argument that a Muslim-dominated state should rightly go to Pakistan. The basis on which such claims are made rests on memoirs of third persons and, more dubiously, hearsay. It is a sad end-state for a man who did so much to unify India from Manipur to Junagadh and from Kashmir to Hyderabad.</p>
<p>Patel died in 1950 and Nehru in 1964. All other participants in the events of those years, too, have died. A series of intimate debates, discussions and disagreements have gone with them. What is left behind is a mass of papers that has been used to interpret what these founders of modern India did and the reasons for their actions. It is among those papers that ideological battles were fought once. In the past decade or so, commentators have replaced historians; the newspaper column has replaced the scholarly monograph. The result is heightened shrillness of the debate over the same points again and again, something that has increased in frequency as Patel and Nehru get appropriated by formations at the two ends of India’s polarised political space. There is virtually no new study that compares the two from a historical and political perspective.</p>
<p>One interesting study that offers some insight based on modern political theory is the essay <em>Nehru’s Judgement</em> by a Nehruphile, Sunil Khilnani (the tract is part of the volume, <em>Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn</em> edited by Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, 2009). In this, Khilnani lists three types of leaders who were to be found in the India of that time. Those endowed with ‘ethical certainty’— the exemplar being Mahatma Gandhi. Then comes the group impressed with ‘theoretical absolutism’. The examples are Subhas Chandra Bose and Communist leaders. Finally, there are the ‘pure politicians’, men who, according to Khilnani ,‘set themselves definite political goals, who wielded impressive forensic skills and analytic powers, and who are extraordinarily effective in using political means to achieve their ends’. Patel and Muhammah Ali Jinnah fall in this class. Nehru has been kept apart from this classification. Khilnani describes him as a man torn between the life of an active politician and that of a person seeking detachment and self-reflection, a modern philosopher king as it were.</p>
<p>Most commentators on Nehru and Patel have followed one or the other debased version of a Khilnani-type schema. Nehru is the moderniser, Patel the arch-reactionary; Nehru is defined by his ‘Idea of India’, Patel mostly by silence; Nehru wrote books outlining his vision, Patel wrote letters inked in bureaucratese. Finally, Nehru left a set of new institutions—the Election Commission and Planning Commission—even as he strengthened parliamentary democracy, while Patel died in 1950 before a single brick had been laid for the ‘temples of new India’. Liberal India has, down to the last believer in the Nehruvian ideology, imbibed these binaries as normal extensions of what the two men stood for.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Patel is often blamed for trying to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan for ‘communal reasons’. It is a sad epilogue for a man who did so much to unify India from Manipur to Junagadh and from Kashmir to Hyderabad</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All that works well for polemical purposes. But there’s another way to look at the differing ideas of the two, one that takes political priors into account. What comes first, democracy or the nation- state? Nehru’s answer—and manifold contradictions have accompanied it since then—is that both are coeval. His heirs, India’s liberal intellectual class, have inverted the order of priority somewhat: without democracy the nation will not survive. On an intellectual plane, Patel’s answer, one that can only be gleaned indirectly through his letters, speeches and memoranda, would have been the opposite: nation first, the form of rule later. This is an extreme interpretation, of course, one that is meant to highlight differences. In reality, the entire nationalist leadership had agreed to democracy.</p>
<p>These differences, while they go a long way in explaining liberal political desires, also highlight the crisis, if not the slow trainwreck, of the Nehruvian vision. The democracy that Nehru led was a liberal one, based on individual dignity but with a tinge of protection for group identity, especially that of Muslims. Over time, this formulation has been inverted almost totally: the spectrum of group identities now encompasses virtually all minority religions and a very virulent championing of caste identities. The primacy of identity over individual dignity now threatens to render the issue of political priors irrelevant: the kind of identity-based politics described above leaves the idea, or even the need, of an Indian nation uncertain. Some contemporary examples in Indian politics illustrate this.</p>
<p>- Some members of the Congress openly espouse the creation of a ‘grey zone’ between full integration and secession in Kashmir.</p>
<p>- Various regionalisms that are now virtually sub-nationalisms and are trying experiments that range from politicising issues like state flags to forging new identities over existing ones that have been accepted for long.</p>
<p>- In Punjab, the lesson that had been learnt after a decade of terrorism was that no political party should pander to separatist sentiment. But that is exactly what Arvind Kejriwal—an erstwhile liberal hero—did when he stayed at the home of a known separatist during the last election campaign there.</p>
<p>The list of these examples can be extended. The political distance travelled from 1947 can be gauged by the fact that the mere mention of the expressions ‘Hindu’ and ‘majority’ immediately results in a volley of protests from liberal intellectuals and is held as a threat to India as a nation-state. It does not require great imagination to see that there is no need to ‘resurrect’ Patel; he is simply there as the end-product of the withering of the Nehruvian system.</p>
<p>The other issue in the Nehru-Patel controversy is the alleged inconsistency in what these leaders said at different times and the uses to which their statements have been put. The process of India’s partition was as messy as it was complex; 190 years of British rule were being undone in a matter of months. Anyone poring over the archives from that period will find it hard to keep up with the twists and turns of events. It would be a rare leader who could keep from contradicting himself for the simple reason that events could not be anticipated; they could only be reacted to. The reactions changed as the events changed.</p>
<p>What ought to concern unbiased historians are the ideological uses to which these inconsistencies have been put. These are not failures of Nehru and Patel, but of the small men who interpret history. One, admittedly selective, example is in order. It is about of Patel’s ‘animus’ towards Sheikh Abdullah and greed for Kashmiri territory. One commentator has made much of selectively reading the letter of July 3rd, 1947, to Ram Chandra Kak, the prime minister of Kashmir then. There, Patel tries to force the hand of Kashmir’s government to accede to India as it has ‘no other choice’. That is where the selective reading ends. What is ignored is the very next paragraph where Patel urges the release of Abdullah—who was in jail at that time—in the larger interest of the state.</p>
<p>It is interesting to contrast this letter (and scores of others) with the claim that Patel wanted to ‘let go’ of Kashmir. Either Patel was wildly inconsistent within a span of a year, or, as the reigning interpretation has it, he was so communal that he was willing to give up Muslim-dominated Kashmir for a bolstered Hindu India. In virtually all such ‘analysis’, the complexity of the unfolding situation in India—the year before and after its independence—has been set aside. Sound principle of historical interpretation has been replaced by the political and ideological predilections of writers.</p>
<p>Was Patel communal? This is one of those ‘head on’ questions that attract ire and evasion in equal measure. Even if one reformulates it—was Patel in favour of a more homogenous India?—the charge of his being ‘communal’ refuses to go away. While care is exercised in not saying it, most commentators of a Nehruvian persuasion feel this indeed to be the case: Patel for them was the other supporting end of the Two-Nation theory. But howls arise the moment one says that the nationalist leadership implicitly accepted it as a historical reality when the plan of June 3rd, 1947, to partition India was accepted. Only Patel is singled out. It is instructive to ask whether Dr BR Ambedkar, another great leader of modern India, would be subjected to the same treatment for his arguments to let Kashmir go and focus on East Bengal (as he did in his speech when he resigned from the Cabinet, on September 27th, 1951).</p>
<p>Nehru assumed that a multi-religious India could be turned into a strong nation-state, a goal on which Patel agreed with him. It is another matter that this wish, or claim, or whatever one wants to call it, was put to severe tests almost from the moment India gained independence. The Abdullah-Patel-N Gopalaswami Ayyangar letters show that even close friends of India—as the Sheikh certainly was—did not share the premise of a centralised India. Since then, these challenges have grown manifold: one only has to look at the map of India to see it. There are historians who continue to challenge the premise of building a strong centralised state and say the goal is quixotic. Their political affinities should surprise no one.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/ironsoul1.jpg?itok=5GZMwhef" /><div>BY: Siddharth Singh</div><div>Node Id: 23960</div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 08:01:41 +0000vijayopen23960 at http://www.openthemagazine.com